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Question for April 2020

How do you say ‘brother’ in Nahuatl?? Asked by Bildeston Primary School. Chosen and answered by Dr. Frances Karttunen

The Mesoamericans had a more complicated kinship system. Instead of one Nahuatl word for ‘brother,’ there are two, one for ‘older brother’ and one for ‘younger brother.’
’Older brother’ is āchcāuhtli.
’Younger brother’ is iccaāuhtli.

But these dictionary forms are never used in real speech, because a brother is a brother of someone, and a possessed form is required. If we don’t know who that is, then the forms are:-
tīāchcāuh ‘older brother of someone’
tīiccāuh ‘younger brother of someone’.

If we want to say ‘my older brother,’ ‘his younger brother,’ etc., then in place of the tī- prefix, one uses the personal possessive prefixes:
no- ‘my’
mo- ‘your’ (singular)
ī- ‘his/her’
to- ‘our’
amo- ‘your’ (plural)
īm- ’their’.
If one is talking about someone’s multiple brothers, the plural suffix is -huān.

One more complication: these forms are also used for one’s older male cousins and younger male cousins. And if a boy is talking about his schoolmates, he uses these forms for them all, even if they are not his actual brothers or cousins.

NOTE on pronunciation! A vowel with a bar above it (technically called a ‘macron’) is a LONG vowel.

Picture sources:-
• Pic 1: Illustration by Alberto Beltrán scanned from The Sun Kingdom of the Aztecs by Victor W. von Hagen (1960)
• Pic 2: detail of a mural by R. Anguiano, National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City.

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Dr. Frances Karttunen

Dr. Frances Karttunen

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